glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that
your wound is so slight--glad that you need not be shut up long when you
are due elsewhere."

What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The
Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well
that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and,
more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his
cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a
bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.

"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the
'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad
Boy,' Heine---but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on
economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb,
that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"

"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."

"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.

"And Omar?"

"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"

"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who
rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the
Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy
profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to
the surface.

"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but
with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell
about his past.

XII

MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE

Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty,
once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Senor
Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which
was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his
very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.

"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.

"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding
out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to
geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her
geranium bed.

Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She
guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little
inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.

"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said